.Q: DISCUSS THE KEATS AS AN ESCAPIST.

All Romantic poets more or less are escapists. Romantic poetry presents not the
world of reality, but the world of dreams. Like all romantic poets, Keats longs to
escape from the biter realities .But a careful study of his poetry reveals that his
escapism is only a passing mood.

Keats is better known as romantic escapist .In the ode to a Nightingale Keats
fully expounds upon romantic escapism. He is pouring out his thoughts very
beautifully and is longing for escape from the world full of strife, sadness and
grief. While listening to and appreciating the sweetly sung song of the nightingale,
Keats too, wishes to become like her so that he can fly away from the cruel world
that has given him nothing else but pain.

Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget

The weariness, the fever and the fret

He tries to dip into or to fly to an ideal world of happiness, beauty, music

and imagination forgetting his reality in the world. Keats wishes to escape
with the help of poetic imagination but nothing else which his own word
gives evidence,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards

But on the viewless wings of poesy.

Keats repeatedly wishes to become like the nightingale whose melodious song is
eternal and universal and soothes not only the mind but also the soul. He states that
although he has no wings yet he would like to fly away on the viewless wings of
Poesy.

The poet thinks of forgetting his personal loss and suffering in life by drinking and
sleeping under the influence of the liquor. He thinks that the sweet song of the
nightingale is a sure testimony of the absolutely happy world of the bird. The poet
therefore eagerly wants to escape from the life of reality, which has given him a
surfeit of torment and misery in the form of ill health, failure in the poetic career
and in love, and bereavement of a younger brother, and seek refuge in the forest
world of the nightingale.His personal affections are also seen as part of the sad lot
of humanity as a whole. The general picture of malady is undeniably moving in its
pitiful starkness:
'Here, where men sit and hear each...

Then again, Keats expresses the desire to die an easeful Death so that he doesnt
have to bear the harsh realities of life. Also aware that he cant become like the
nightingale, who songs so melodiously, regardless of all the crisis in the world and
whose beauty cant be snatched away by passing time, Keats prefers death as a
solution to his problems. When his illusion is broken; the poet comes back from his
world of fancy into the real world, where he has to live and fight for his survival
and Regrets that imagination has not the power to beguile him forever. He says

Forlorn! The very world is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my soul self!
But Keats world of imagination remains only a short while. When he
thinks that the Urn and the song of the nightingale will

Here he remembers the bitterness of his own life and reminds us that
of our life. He considers that life is full of misery, sorrow and disease, of
tiring struggle, of restlessness and pain; that life is nothing but a series of
groans and complaints; that old mens life is helpless and pitiful.

Keats life-long creed is A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

(Endymion). So wherever he sees any beautiful picture or scenery or hears
any attractive melody or song, he feels joy, and forgets his harsh reality, and
becomes one with that, and thus he escapes. For examples,
having seen a beautiful Urn in British Museum, he forgets his
position, even he talks with the pictures depicted on the Urn, e.g.
Ah, happy, happy boughs that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.

In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the poet takes us away from the world of time to
the world of eternity. The imagination of the poet passes from the conceited form
of beauty to the eternal spirit of beauty that is, from the finite to the infinite.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual fear, but more endeared
 Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Nevertheless, the world of fun which is the world of escapism has its drawbacks,
asset is a Cold Pastoral. It has desolation and non-fulfillment.

To sum up, we can confidently remark that Keats is essentially a poet of beauty
and no one else, in pursuit of his life long aspired dream he enters sometime into a
world which is not plausible regarding the standards of such a great poet, but his
forgetfulness introduces him to the real meanings of life. He appreciates the beauty
of art but he does not declare art as the ultimate finding of human struggle, with its
beautified unrealistic presentation he also mentions its drawbacks. It is unsatisfied,
cruel, though eternal world. Life is preferred by him in spite of all its transiteriness
and flux. He declares loudly, fancy cannot cheat well as it is fame to be. This is
what makes him a realist rather than an escapist.

it will be a gross injustice to consider Keats an escapist only on the basis of a

single poem. Even if we take ode on a grecian urn only in consideration, it will
soon be realised by us after a careful study of the ode that the poet is trying to
objectify his primary idea regarding the difference between Nature and Work of
Art, much like the greek philosophers who always thought that an Work of art
cannot supersede Nature as it is a mere replication of nature. Work of art is always
twice removed from the ideal and hence it has both its advantages and
disadvantages. Time is captured/freezed in art while because of that very fact, there
is neither any generation nor degeneration. In other words there is no palpable
development in art whereas Nature seems to grow and change and engulf us all in
its ever changing manifestations.

#Escapism of Keats
# Keats view of reality and imagination
# Contrast between reality and imagination, between art and
reality

he forgets his sorrow and joins the nightingale in spirit. This is the moment when
nature with her moon and stars and flowers, enters into his soul and his soul is
mergedin nature. Keats and nightingale are one, it is his soul that sings in the bird,
and he sings.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy.
But Keats world of imagination remains only a short while. When he
thinks that the Urn and the song of the nightingale will
remain for ages but he will not, rather he is forlorn, he comes back to
reality. He says in the last stanza of Ode to a Nightingale
Forlorn! The very would is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self.
KEATS' PRESENTATION OF ROMANTIC ESCAPISM IN HIS POEMS

John Keats is one of the most remarkable poets of English Literature. His poetry
revolves around romanticism and idealism, bringing to the fore all his thoughts,
ideas, experiences and desires.

In Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats, seeing the pictures on the Urn,

dissolves in them through imagination, as if he is with them who seem to be
alive.

Therefore, we see that Keats is so disgusted with the real life that he
always tries to escape from it. Even he has no revolutionary concerns of the
age in his poems, while other Romantic poets, e.g. Wordsworth, Shelley
have eagerly greeted the revolutions and Byron deals with social problems.
Though Keats escapism is individual, it sometimes becomes common,
when we seek a suitable place to relieve from the bitterness of our life.

Like all romantics, Keats loves nature and its varied charms. He transfigures
everything into beauty that he touches with magic hand of chance. He says in Ode
to Nightingale,

Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

But being too happy in thine happiness,

Beauty is Keats religion and he is very romantic is his frank pursuit of beauty and
in that pursuit of beauty, he completely forgets himself and the world around him.

The romantic quality in literature has been defined by Pater as,

The addition of strangeness to the beauty.

All sorts of poetry deals with beauty in one way or the other, but romantic poetry
goes a step ahead and imparts strangeness to the beauty. Keats sees beauty in
ordinary things of nature. Earth, to him, is a place of where beauty renews itself
everyday, the sky is full of huge cloudy symbols of high romance. Keats loves
beauty in the flower, in the stream and in the cloud but he loves it in each thing as
a part of Universal Beauty, which is infinite --- the mighty abstract idea of
Beauty.

Thou was not born for death, immortal bird

The song of the nightingale becomes a symbol of the universal spirit of beauty.
The nightingale is, for Keats, the symbol of unlimited joy, infinite happiness and
universal spirit of beauty. Pursuit of the unknown, the invisible and infinite
inspires the creation of all the romantic poetry of the world.

Keats was true romantic poet, because his attention was not only beauty but also
truth. He saw beauty in truth and truth in beauty.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

He persistently endeavoured to reconcile the world of imagination with the world

of reality. Therefore, Middleton Murray calls Keats a true romantic.

A pure poet feels and expresses his joy in beauty, but when he feels this joy, he
realizes also a new aspect of beauty, which is truth. In this identity of beauty and
truth, lies the harmony of universe. Keats realizes this harmony when he says that
truth and beauty are the same thing.

Wordsworth and Shelley both had theories but Keats has none. We cannot accuse
Keats of any withdrawal or refusal; he was merely about his business and his
business was that of a pure poet. (T. S. Eliot)
For Keats, the necessary quality of poetry is submission to the things as they are,
without any effort to intellectualize them into something else. Keats often says that
the poet must not live for himself, but must feel for others, and must do good, but
he must do so by being a poet, not by being a teacher or moralist. There is no
didacticism in Keats as there is in Wordsworth. He delivers what he sees; the
pleasures of seeing nature and beauty.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.

At one time he regrets about the songs of Spring and but then he sees the beauties
of Autumn and involves himself in them. He instantly forgets the pain of losing
songs of Spring and starts admiring Autumn.

The idea of French revolution had awakened the youthful passions of both
Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had stirred the wrath of Scott; they had worked
like yeast on Byron. They had brought forth new matters for Shelley who re-
moulded them and turned them into prophecy of the future. There was only one
poet, Keats, of that age who they could not affect in any way whatsoever.

Keats was so preoccupied with beauty that he turned a blind eye to the actualities
of life around him. (Stopeford Brooke)

It is true that Keats poetry does not express the revolutionary ideas of his age, but
Keats was a pure who expressed in his poetry the most worth while part of himself
and it was his vision of beauty, which was also truth to him. If his aim was to
pursue beauty, which was also truth to him, he cannot be called an escapist, for in
pursuing beauty, he pursued truth.

The poetry of Keats shows a gradual process of development. His earlier

experiments in verse are products of youthful imagination, immature and
overcharged with imagery. The young poet has abnormal sensibility, but lacks
experience of life. Endymion opens with the famous line --- A thing of beauty is a
joy forever, it is full of glorious promise but it is lost in shadows and uncertainties,
because it is not based upon experiences of life. In the Odes, Keats poetry
assumes a deeper tone. There he faces the sorrows and sufferings of life. He would
wish for a life of joy and happiness, like that of nightingale.

Fade far away, and quite forget

What thou amongst the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret,
There, where men sit and hear each other groan;
(Ode to Nightingale)

Thus he longed to escape from realities of life, but it was a passing mood that
seized him when he was contrasting the lot of man with that of the nightingale.
Sorrows and sufferings are inevitable in life and he fully realized that escape from
realities of life was neither possible nor desirable. In Hyperion, he wrote:

None can usurp the height .

But those to whom miseries of the world
Are miseries, and will not let them rest.

In a sonnet, he says:

How fevered that man who cannot look

Upon his mortal days with temperate blood.

Keats was trying to attain serenity of mood in the midst of all the sufferings which
he was undergoing in his own life and which he saw all around him. This mood of
serenity is expressed in Ode to Autumn, which accordingly to Middleton
Murray,

The perfect and unforced utterance of the truth contained in the magic words (of
Shakespeare): Ripeness is all.

For Keats, earlier hankering for the world of Flora and Pan for unreflecting
enjoyment of sensuous delights--- is past; he now subjected himself persistently
and unflinchingly to life. He faced life with all uncertainties and contradictions, its
sorrows and joys. The lines ---

Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
(Ode to Nightingale)

are thrilled with aching hopelessness. In Ode to Melancholy, he says,

dwells with beauty --- beauty that must die

Melancholy arises from transience of joy and joy is transient by its nature.
Therefore Keats accepts life as a whole --- with its joys and beauty as well as its
sorrows and despair.

To quote the words of Middleton Murray about Ode on a Grecian Urn,

These lines contain deep wisdom purchase at the full price of deep suffering.
They are symbol and prophecy of a comprehension of human life to which
mankind can attain.

Keats study of Lemprieres Classical Dictionary fully acquainted him with the
Greek mythology; and he loved every bit of it, and freely used it in his poetry. The
stories of Endymion, Lamia and Hyperion, are based upon Greek legends. In his
Ode to Psyche and Ode on a Grecian Urn, the subjects are Greek, and the poet
while expressing his passion for beauty transports himself in his imagination to the
days of ancient Greeks.

But the most important factor is Keats Hellenism was his own Greek temper ---
the inborn temperamental Greekness of his mind. The power of seeing things with
a childs amazement and forgetfulness was the temper of Keats, as it was the
temper of Greeks --- i.e.; half-worship added half-joy.

The instinctive Greekness of Keats mind lies in his passionate pursuit of beauty,
which is the very soul of his poetry. His passion for beauty finds a concrete
expression in his Ode to Psyche:

Yes, I will be thy priest and buld a fane

In some untrodden regions of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pine shall murmur in the wind.

The Greek did not burden their poetry with philosophy or spiritual message. Their
poetry was incarnation of beauty, and existed for itself. Similarly, Keats was pure
poet. He enjoyed unalloyed pleasure in nature, which for him, did not carry any
philosophical or spiritual message.

Concluding it, Keats, possesses the qualities of romantic and pure poet he loves
nature, which is seen by him with Greek temper. He never thinks about past and
future and his only concern is the present time; the present moment of beauty and
truth. In his early poetry, one can perceive him as an escapist because there was joy
and delight and overcharged imagination because of inexperience youth. But with
gradual development of thought and experience, he comes to the conclusion that
sorrows and joys are always together; rose cannot be taken without its thrones. One
can clearly sees in his Odes that he is not an escapist but he is accepting the
realities of life.

There is something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he

wrote. (Tennyson)

Q: KEATS FINDS TRUTH IN BEAUTY AND VICE VERSA, DISCUSS KEATS

AS A POET OF BEAUTY.
Ans:
In nothing else is Keats as romantic as in his frank pursuit of beauty to him.
Beautyfor him is synonymous with truth. A thing of Beauty is for him a joy
forever. Beauty ishis religion, a Deity. It is in this pursuit of Beauty that he
completely forgets himself andthe world around him. Beauty was for Keats the
moving principle of life. He lovedbeauty in its forms and shapes in the flower and
in cloud, in the song of a bird and in theface of a workman, in a work of art and in
tales of romance and mythology. He uttersfervently,
A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Its loveliness increases, It will never pass into
nothingness.
Keats did not care for history, or for politics or for religions. The ruling principle
ofhis life was worship of beauty. He declared, With a great poet, the sense of beauty
overcomes every other consideration.His (Keats) friend Hayden tells us that;
The humming of the bee, the sight of a flower, the glitter of the sun, seemed
tomake his nature tremble, then his eyes flashed, his cheeks glowed and his
mouthquivered.
He was as sensitive to the beauty of art and literature as to that of life and
nature.Keats in his last days wrote:
If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me nothing to make
my friends prove of my memory, but I have loved the principle of beauty in
allthings and if I had time I would have made myself remembered.
In his earlier poem Sleep and Poetry, the vast idea (beauty in all things)
hadinvolved the poets passing beyond the realm of Flora and old Pan that is
away fromthe realm of beautiful things. He had asked:
And can I ever bid, these joys farewell?
And he had answered,
Yes I must pass them for nobler, life

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,qaisarjanjoa@yahoo.com
24
where I may find the agonies,The strife of human hearts.
He had thus, in that prophetic poem, seen beyond the principle of beauty that
thebeauty in all things. But in Endymion he remained wholly within the realm of
Floraand old Pan because the agonies and strife of human heart had not yet
touched himdirectly. He knew that he had to triumph over pain, but pain had not
yet come and hewas not one to invoke it intellectually Death of his brother.For
Keats beauty is truth. He loved not merely beauty but truth as well and notmerely
the world of imagination but that of reality. He saw beauty in truth and truth
inbeauty. He had the artists vision of beauty and he expresses it in picturesque
style. Tohim beauty and truth were identical and he expresses it most emphatically
because in itlays the secret harmony of the universe.
Beauty is truth, truth beautyThat is all ye know on earth, And all ye need to
know.
He never escaped from the realities of life in pursuit of the beautiful vision of
hisimagination. In fact, the visions of his imagination are based on reality. He
persistentlyendeavoured to reconcile the world of imagination with the world of
reality. He acceptedlife as it is, joy and sorrow, happiness and melancholy both
exist side by side; if there isdiscord in life, it has its music too. Thats why he loves
foul and fair, joy and sorrowmean and elevated alike. He turns unflinchingly to life
and human experiences, and byan act of imagination transmutes the bitterest
human experiences into beauty which istruth.To understand the true nature and
beauty we go to his famous sonnet, Why Did ILaugh Tonight? where he says:
Why did I laugh tonight? No
voice
Verse, fame and beauty are intense Indeed, But death
intenserDeath is lifes need.
Here, Keats is disowning and putting away the Keats who laughed. It is
conqueringof despair by a deeper faith. Poetry, Fame and Beauty are glorious,
none lights so great afame in soul as death. Death is the crown of life.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful
death.
In part the Ode to a Nightingale is a very triumph song to death; as it is a song
ofdespair; as the song of the bird is an invitation to the supreme ecstasy of death,
the voiceof immortality is sounding clear amid the agony of mortality. These two
movements ofthe divided soul are now blending into one strange and unearthly
harmony; it is asthough that deep division of his soul had been reconciled with no
joy diminished and nopain denied. All that Keats had felt and thought is there with
all its contradictions; butnow the contradictions are made one. This acceptance of
his love of good and ill ismanifest in all Keatss poetry as in Ode to a
Nightingale, so it is in Ode to aMelancholy:
She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die And joy whose hand is ever at
his lips bidding Adieu
To Keats, death is not a mockery, but a triumph; not a darkness that blots out
thesouls ecstasies, but the greatest ecstasies of all.

Keats wrote his great odes when his inward victory was accomplished. In Ode to
aNightingale we find that the poet is drowsy with happiness at the Nightingales
songand he dreams that he might follow the voices of the bird into a realm of
utterforgetfulness of the pair of the world and wants an escape from;
The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here where men sit and hear each others
groan,Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,Where youth grows pale and
spectre-thin and dies;Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden eyed
despairs,Where beauty can not keep her lustrous eyes,
Suddenly the dream is real. On the viewless wings of poesy he is fled after the
voiceto a place of embalmed darkness where he is conscious only of the birds
song. He islost in the world which was his lifes achievement, he finds beauty at its
peak, here arecolours, flowers, dreamlike forgetfulness, fragrance and most
beautiful not a tinge ofbitter real life. He becomes a worshipper of beauty, finds a
religious coexistence with itsappearance.Keats concept of beauty is prone to
change as well, he has been in love with thebeauty of imaginative world but in
Ode to Autumn he understands the real meaningsof beauty, when he accepts life
with its all apparently drawbacks. He declares Thou hastthy music too. This is
what makes him a real follower of real beauty.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever This was the lifelong creed of Keats.. Keats
pursued beauty everywhere in nature, in art, and in the great tales of ancient
Greece and to Keats beauty and truth were identical. This was the profoundest and
innermost experience of Keatss soul and he expressed it most emphatically.
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty that is all,
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know,
If his aim was to pursue Beauty, which was also truth, he cannot be called an
escapist, for in pursuing Beauty, he pursued truth. Sorrows and sufferings, as we
know, are inevitable in life. And an escape from the realities of life is neither
possible nor desirable. Keats does not think of the rose withoutits thorns. He
accepts life as a whole with its joy and beauty as well as its pain anddespair. He
attempts to reconcile the loveliness of the world with its transience; its pleasures
with its pains, the longing to enjoy the beautiful with the suspicion that itcannot be
long enjoyed unless much that is not beautiful is faced.

This is how Keats presents the theme of romantic escapism in his poems, as a
depiction of his own sorry state and terribly agonizing experiences. This desire of
escaping is actually a result of a very lonely and miserable life that he has spent,
wherein his career was ruined; his family lost; he couldnt get the love of his life
due to poverty and then had to combat tuberculosis in the end. All these factors
made him pessimistic and compelled him to turn towards the option of escapism,
projected in his poetry as romantic escapism.

Ode to a Nightingale being one of Keats's most significant poetical utterances,

does illustrate an escapist trend of the poet. However, before making any final
appraisal of this feature in the poem, we have to consider what the term
'escapism' implies, and whether in Keats's poetry it is a passing mood or a
permanent obsession.
'Escapism' is usually a pejorative term. It is used to denote a strong criticism of
the habit of shirking and avoiding duties, and a failure to face life's trials. Escapists
run away from harsh, unpleasant facts and duties, thus try to hide themselves in
their idle world of dream and peace, like an ostrich hiding its head in the sands
during the desert-storms. It implies cowardice and spinelessness.
The Romantic poets are known for their poetry about love, life and nature. They
focus on different aspects of life, but don't normally tread into the death and
despairing aspect of daily life.

When we look at other poems by Percy Shelley we see more of the despair within
his writing. It makes one wonder if the despair he writes about comes from his own
life.

In many of Shelley's other works we see him telling the reader that we cannot let
other people take our work because then we might as well dig our own graves. The
reader begines to wonder after reading so many works from Percy Shelley, if he
believes that all people are innately evil, and that there is no good within the
human race. When we read poetry of any poet, we learn a little bit about their lives
and who the poet is. Percy Shelley is one of the poets that puts a little bit of himself
into his poetry. He stood out among other poets because he did not write about life
and love, but rather being bitter and spiteful. He sees despair in everything instead
of joy and love. Reading Percy Shelley can actually put a new spin on poetry and
what it is like.

Shelley, like John Keats, was a high romantic, meaning one of the romantic poets in the
generation following Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Like Keats, Shelley crafts himself into
the artist who burns with his creative spirit, allowing his poetry to consume him. Shelley, more
than any of the British romantics, desires art to consume him as much as he wishes to consume
art. In many ways, Shelley represents everything you either love or hate about romanticism.

Ode to the West Wind.

Whether you find Shelleys poetry wonderful of sickening, Ode to the West Wind is a lyrical
masterpiece, and encapsulates Shelleys vision of himself as a poet and the creative process. Like
so many romantics, Shelley suffers from the tragic attempt to reconcile being with nature. Part of
the romantic agony involves the desire of the poet to not only represent nature in a poem, but
to become nature itself. Like the epic struggle with time, the struggle to unite with nature
becomes doomed to failure for the human. One hundred years later, Yeats would famously write
of his desire to become one with the eternity of nature by freezing himself into a mosaic in
Sailing to Byzantium. Yeats is one of the few famous heirs to the romantic tradition in the
twentieth century, along with Wallace Stevens, who builds upon Walt Whitman and John Keats,
and William Carlos Williams, who Paterson continues almost too facilely Whitmans Leaves of
Grass.
In Ode to the West Wind, Shelley imagines himself one of the infinite leaves blowing in the
west wind of autumn that precedes the winter. The leaves of autumn that fall to the ground,
mixing with the frozen dormancy of winter, grow to new life in the spring. Shelley yearns for his
poetry to take part of the same natural cycle of death and life, life and resurrection. The image
that runs through the poem is that his poetry is like the leaves blowing and falling upon the entire
world, and growing into new creation that will summon mankindlike Christs resurrectionto
see his vision. Hence, there are rampant religious analogies in the poem, yet Shelley uses them to
reject a classic Christian vision for one that almost returns the poet to a pagan visionary. At the
climax of the poem, line 54, Shelley cries out, I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! The poet
at the end may be spent after the act of poetry, as Shelley says to the wind, Drive my dead
thoughts ever the universe (line 63), but his vision is Like withered leaves to quicken a new
birth! Like the spring, his poetry will rise again, And by the incantation of this verse in order
to become revelation for the world.

Sactter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy!

The Image of Leaves and Wind.

Shelley structures the poem around crafty and various meanings of the words / images LEAVES
and WIND. In renaissance sonnets, leaves refer to the pages of a book. Metonymically,
leaves for Shakespeare, or Sidney, or Spencer, can come to mean books, or poetry, or writing
itself. So the image of leaves blowing across the landscape in the autumn turns into a metaphor
of the poet disseminating his work and his vision. WIND has an extremely interesting
etymological history that Shelley uses to a great extent. The word spirit comes from the word
wind. When the Hebrew Bible portrays God breathing into the dust to give life to humankind
in Genesis, the Judaic tradition bestows upon wind an image of Gods eternal life. Therefore,
spirit transforms into the mysterious force of the divinewe have come now to equate that
which is spiritual as being holy, or filled with a religious sense, or sacred. Yet we also derive
from spirit the notion of lively, or full of life, resembling the enlivening aspect of wind / Gods
breathsuch as filled with spirit, or describing a person as having a lively spirit.

So Shelley utilizes the ambiguity of WIND / SPIRIT to create both a religious and a secular
connotation in his poem. Like the breath of God the breathes life into dustlike the west wind the
blows the leaves of autumn which will eventually become springShelley desire his leaves (his
words, his poems, his vision) to circulate amongst the world and to bring revelation to mankind.

Not really my cup of tea, but I admire his lyrical density.

The central thematic concerns of Shelleys poetry are largely the same themes that defined
Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelleys era: beauty, the passions,
nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination. What makes Shelleys
treatment of these themes unique is his philosophical relationship to his subject matterwhich
was better developed and articulated than that of any other Romantic poet with the possible
exception of Wordsworthand his temperament, which was extraordinarily sensitive and
responsive even for a Romantic poet, and which possessed an extraordinary capacity for joy,
love, and hope. Shelley fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human
happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair (he had many,
particularly in book-length poems such as the monumental Queen Mab) almost always stem
from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.

Shelleys intense feelings about beauty and expression are documented in poems such as Ode to
the West Wind and To a Skylark, in which he invokes metaphors from nature to characterize
his relationship to his art. The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important
essay A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Poetry,
Shelley argues, exercises and expands the imagination, and the imagination is the source of
sympathy, compassion, and love, which rest on the ability to project oneself into the position of
another person. He writes,

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in
the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his
own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect
by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it
with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their
own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever
craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man,
in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between
beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of arts sensual pleasures to improve
society. Byrons pose was one of amoral sensuousness, or of controversial rebelliousness; Keats
believed in beauty and aesthetics for their own sake. But Shelley was able to believe that poetry
makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral
optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the
same time.

we see Percy Bysshe Shelley as a hero of English Romanticism. His verses are full of lyricism
and beauty, pulsing with the vitality for which he was known during his life. Though his methods
were unconventional, in his poetry and life Shelley strove for a more beautiful and true world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley "kept your brain in constant action," a friend of his wrote after his death.2
He continues to do so today.